8 ms·

The design is polarizing

• blehn 5y ago
  So was the design of the iPhone, and Yeezy sneakers. How is that "awful"?
  • Symbiote 5y ago
    The Cybertruck wouldn't be street-legal in Europe, since it can't meet pedestrian/cyclist collision safety requirements. Take whatever fashionable discomfort you like, but let's not increase the danger to others. "According to EU auto standards expert Stefan Teller the Cybertruc would have to undergo 'major modifications to the basic structure' because the Cybertruck 'contradicts the European security philosophy'" https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/12/16/tesla-cybertruck-not-street-legal-in-eu/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/12/16/tesla-cy...
  • neogodless 5y ago
    How is the design of the iPhone polarizing? It looks roughly like every other smart phone out there. That just seems like a bad example of the point you're trying to make. The Yeezy, on the other hand, does remind me of the Cybertuck!
    • blehn 5y ago
      No, every other smart phone out there looks roughly like the iPhone. When the iPhone was announced, many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea.
      • matthewdgreen 5y ago
        The iPhone took a fairly straightforward approach, which was that to have a working touchscreen interface you need to maximize screen real estate on a phone. Once you make that decision and price the components, everything else about the design falls out: the only “design” questions are about the casing material and whether the corners should be rounded. The iPhone didn’t succeed because people thought the fashion decisions were brilliant: it succeeded because people wanted a working touch-screen phone (because even before the iPhone we all recognized that previous phones sucked for browsing the Internet.) I can’t figure out how the Cybertruck analogizes to this. Do people need a cab that can stop small-caliber bullets? It would seem that this is not what most people are excited about. But I am sometimes wrong.
        • blehn 5y ago
          The touchscreen interface is indeed a design decision, and it was a polarizing one. Many people did _not_ want a touchscreen interface in 2007. They insisted that the physical keyboards of their blackberries were more usable and more practical. In 2007, the iPhone was a polarizing product. The comment I responded to implied that the cybertruck is awful _because_ it's polarizing. I gave two examples of wildly successful products that were also polarizing designs.
          • matthewdgreen 5y ago
            And my point is that there is a difference between a polarizing purely-aesthetic design choice and a polarizing feature-set choice. The decision to maximize screen real estate at the cost of a physical keyboard was primarily a feature-set tradeoff. It could have gone spectacularly wrong, but the tradeoff was at least calculated around producing some tangible benefits that people already admitted they wanted. It turned out to be popular in the end because people really wanted to browse websites on their phone, and physical keyboards make it hard to build a portable phone with an acceptable screen. Similarly, the decision to build an electric-only car vs. an ICE/plugin-hybrid car (and in the process free up space under the hood, remove gas tanks, produce a different driving experience) is also a polarizing feature-set choice that produces some aesthetic results. By contrast the design of the Cybertruck, as best I can tell, is almost entirely aesthetic in nature. Insofar as it maximizes certain features, they’re “Mad Max bulletproof indestructibility (but not the windows)” features and I’m not sure those are going to carry the mass market. And Tesla really needs to carry the mass market if they’re going to stay in business long-term. Picking weird aesthetic hills to polarize on and/or betting that what the mass market really wants us to resist small-caliber rifle attacks might work out in the end, but it sure seems like an unnecessary risk.
        • dzhiurgis 5y ago
          Rust resistance might make cybertruck very resilient machine... Only question is how is Tesla going to support them without online DRM 20-30-40 years later.
      • JohnFen 5y ago
        > many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea I still do. To this day, I often wish that my phone had them.
        • blehn 5y ago
          That's fine, I'm merely refuting the assertion that a polarizing design is inherently awful or would prevent a product from being successful.